My first internet experience was in 1996, just a few years after the web opened to the public.

Computers came much earlier. My first machine arrived in 1982, a Commodore VIC-20, and I worked my way through the whole Commodore family, the 16, the 64, the Amiga, until the Intel generation took over.

After 1995 I started surfing the web. I signed up with one of the first Italian providers offering flat-rate access, and the internet felt exactly like what it was: a new continent.

My first professional internet experience came in 1997, at the University of Naples Federico II. I built the website for a university event, Cyberspazio, hosted at cyberspazio.unina.it.

The original server is long gone, but the site outlived it. The Internet Archive still holds it, frozen as it looked in 2006: browse my first website in the Wayback Machine. That page is now almost thirty years old, which officially makes it internet archaeology, and me a primary source.

I even found the original promotional video of the event:

It has been a long time since that first connection. The best is yet to come.